The Perfumer’s Story: After Hours

Glamorous, magnetic and sensual

Yesterday, I spent the morning with one of my favourite ladies in beauty, Azzi Glasser, to discover her new fragrance created especially for Harrods.

Azzi took us back to her childhood when musing on the time that she felt she first connected with scent. “Children are much more in touch with their sense of smell. Their brains aren’t as busy and their sense of smell is heightened.”

She told us about how she used to watch her mother get ready for parties, and after make-up, lashes and the works, she would spray her perfume and kiss them all goodbye. “She left a trail of her perfume and that was the presence she left behind. I couldn’t see her any more but I could smell her.”

Fascinated by perfumes and the art of creating juices that captured personalities and told stories, Azzi went on to create some of the most iconic fragrances of our time. For her very first perfume, she bucked the trend of light, watery fragrances with her disruptive Agent Provocateur perfume. This brought heady chypres back into play and broke records with huge success. What followed was a journey of creating fragrances for brands, people, places and everything else you can think of.

One of the facets of Azzi’s perfumery is to create scents for actors and actresses to wear when playing a new role. She created a juice comprised of poisonous flowers for Helena Bonham Carter to wear as Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter, and recently collaborated with director Matthew Vaughn to create the scent of the Kingsman. Remembering an actress that was playing a chain-smoking alcoholic, she laughed that another actor once said she was “taking the role too far” when she emerged on set at 6am stinking of cigarettes and whiskey. Unbeknownst to her team, Azzi had created a fragrance to capture the staleness of them and she was simply dowsed in perfume.

So well to capture a person and their personality in a scent, but how do you apply this to a place? After Hours, the perfume at hand yesterday, is a sensory vision of Harrods department store. “A place has a personality too, and it’s all about ingredients in the moment. You can’t even smell what the ingredients are; it’s like a secret.” An exclusive fragrance for Harrods, Azzi has worked to capture what she says is “the most beautiful department store in the world, full of luxury and prestige.”

“I always wondered what happened when you close the doors at Harrods; this fragrance is like a fantasy world in my head. In London, everything happens after hours. The real party is always the after party; that’s where the night begins. I wanted a richness from being lost in the perfume, something complex, sexy but subtle, and very mysterious. With After Hours, you don’t know what it’s about but you just love it. It’s a feeling and an emotion that you get from the place, and this captures the character of Harrods.”

I love the way Azzi pictures fragrances as personalities. She completely brings a scent to life in a way that no other brand seems to. I wear lots of Azzi’s perfumes, whether it’s Twisted Iris from The Perfumer’s Story or Illamasqua Freak, my favourite ever perfume and one of her creations. After Hours, yet again, has completely captured me. A very different fragrance to anything else I’ve tried of hers, this is magnetic and carnal.

A final thought – the packaging of Azzi’s fragrances is exquisite. Housed in a box shaped like a fairytale, each fragrance from The Perfumer’s Story has just as much place sat amongst your favourite stories as it does worn on the skin. Most of Azzi’s fragrances come in a black box, but After Hours is in a beautiful white book box, detailed with gold lettering and stamped with her signature blood red wax seal.

After Hours, £95 for 30ml, will launch exclusively at Harrods this September along with everything else from The Perfumer’s Story. Be sure to try my favourites while you’re with her – Twisted Iris, Old Books and Grey Myrrh.